I said, war, huh
Good God, y'all
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing. . . .
-- Edwin Starr,
1970
Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong wrote War for Motown in 1969, and it became a No. 1 smash in 1970 for the label's Edwin Starr.Commercial and artistic success, however, is not the guarantor of absolute truth.
And as the United States' recent experience tells us, sometimes war is good for something. Sometimes you get a stainless-steel sh*tter out of the deal.
There's a certain logic to that, and in this Reuters report from the soon-to-be abandoned Camp Irony Victory Base.
The U.S. military is vacating Saddam Hussein's ornate palaces at its war headquarters in Baghdad and will turn the property over to Iraq next month, but Saddam's prison toilet is leaving with the Americans. The stainless steel commode and a reinforced steel door have been removed from the cell where the dictator spent two years before his 2006 execution and is destined for a military police museum in the United States.
"We're not taking anything that the Iraqis had. We are only taking stuff that we put in, we utilized, and when we didn't need it any more, we took it home," Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Brooks, a U.S. military historian, said on a tour of the site on Monday.
The villa where American troops built a maximum-security jail for Saddam and his henchman Chemical Ali sits on a U.S. complex near Baghdad's airport known as Victory Base, which is scheduled to be handed over to Iraq's government in December as U.S. forces withdraw completely by year's end.
Surrounded by 42 km (27 miles) of blast walls and razor wire, Victory, the largest of the 505 bases the U.S. military once operated in Iraq, housed over 40,000 soldiers and up to 25,000 workers. Only 4,000 troops remain there.
I KEEP wondering how to sum this all up -- "this" being America's whole disaster of a new millennium. How can we distill, say, the Iraq experience into something concise enough to fit on a T-shirt?
I think I got something:We came to Iraq,
got 4,483 troops killed
and 33,183 wounded,
spent a trillion bucks . . .
and all we got was this lousy toilet
THAT'S what I call a legacy.Did I mention that, as it turns out, the MP museum at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., doesn't even want the crapper? Gee, I guess Whitfield and Strong were right after all. My apologies to them.
Over on Rod Dreher's American Conservative blog, it took exactly nine comments before someone started throwing around the L-word to denigrate anyone expressing any doubt that St. Louis cops may have been too quick to turn a disturbed, steak-knife wielding individual into Swiss cheese.
Could there be any more telling example of the dangerous ideological warfare this country is engaged in? Someone had just watched a cell-phone video of a man being shot to death, and the first instinct after someone says "Whoa! Wait a minute!" was to politicize the entire thing. To start, without any evidence of anyone's actual political leanings, hurling the word "liberal" as an epithet.
The video above isn't the only tragedy we are witnessing here. It's also tragic that, in a world gripped by spiritual, cultural and social crises, the only thing Western civilization (or what is left of it) has left is ideology.
HERE'S a thought: A world without doubt is a breeding ground for genocidal maniacs.
Here’s another thought, this one specifically dealing with the "officer-involved shooting" of Kajieme Powell in St. Louis: There were people reasonably close to the officers’ line of fire. There were storefronts behind the guy that appeared to be in the line of fire. What if the cops had missed with a few rounds?
What if they’d missed and there was a ricochet off of a brick wall?
Most hunters know better than to pull the trigger when there’s a possibility you might hit something else if you miss your target. Many cops, it would seem, not so much.
FURTHERMORE, why not slowly back away to keep separation between you and the mentally-ill guy with a knife and buy a little time for other options? Why not put the door of the police SUV between you and the disturbed man?
Buy time. Try to engage. Make an effort to calm the guy down.
Why is deadly force seemingly the first and only option in such situations? And note that the officers’ guns were out the second they got out of their vehicle.
I can’t say for certain whether or not the shooting was justified but, as others in the media have said, this just doesn’t look right.
I THINK the St. Louis shooting -- not to mention the egregious police misbehavior during the Ferguson, Mo., protests -- raises numerous legitimate questions that require answers and not being derided as a “liberal” — a veritable enemy of “truth, justice and the American Way.”
I wouldn’t think twice if the St. Louis incident was the response of two infantrymen on the battlefield. But police officers aren’t infantrymen — or at least they used not to be. I think it raises a legitimate question of whether cops now are being trained as such and, if so, why?
But there’s no room for questions in Ideological America, where the “other side” is always the Other, and we’re always spoiling for a fight. As God is my witness, this will not end well.